It seems I'm not alone in wondering when or even if Nintendo will release the Wii Balance Board as a standalone peripheral. As it stands right now, the only way to get your hands on one is to buy Wii Fit - and good luck with that as already in the UK, stores have sold out and in the US, unless you've pre-ordered or are prepared to stand in a long queue on the 19th, you can forget about it.

From Nintendo's perspective, it doesn't make sense for the Wii board to be sold as a standalone product at this stage. Firstly, besides Wii Fit and We Ski, there will be no other games available at launch and since you can't use more than one Wii board at a time, there will be no need for users to buy more than one. Then there's the matter of marketing. How do you market something like the Wii Balance Board on its own? It's far easier to market a product like Wii Fit that bundles the Wii board and then let users figure out for themselves that they've actually bought a peripheral that could be used for other games - clever.

In future, as more games are released we could find that there is enough demand for the Wii Balance Board to be sold as a standalone product or maybe we could see the Wii board bundled in with one of the other 10 games that are rumoured to be in the pipeline. Time will tell.